Word: ymca
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...dial her mom in Lancaster, Ohio. "Hurry it up, Mama! I have the IP number," she says. In seconds, Ashton's smiling mom appears in real time on the computer screen. "Good morning, Princess," Tawny Kaleita-Sniderman says. Ashton chatters about Saturday's plans--bowling with Dad and the YMCA Indian Princesses, then a sleepover at a friend's house. "Mom, put Sputnik up, please," she squeals. Kaleita-Sniderman gently holds a bewildered-looking dog with pointy brown ears to the camera. Ashton reads a list of jelly-bean flavors--almond, chocolate pudding, sardine. "Wait a minute!" her mom laughs...
...Saturday morning before sunrise the crumbling YMCA on Beatrice Street near the Durban waterfront resounds with music and foot-stomping. Once this South African port city on the Indian Ocean hummed day and night with Zulu stevedores hauling ship cargo. Now in the small hours, the docks are quiet, but inside the Y, isicathamiya choral groups are pulsing. Isicathamiya (i-see-ca-tah-me-ya) encompasses elements of Zulu ritual celebrations and American gospel and ragtime. Opening for concerts in the late evening, the Beatrice Street Y offers a dim, sweltering performance hall one flight up crooked wooden stairs...
...remember the first day I walked into a YMCA weight room, a scrawny kid just entering those joyous years of puberty. There was a tinny radio in one corner with a coat hanger for an antenna cranking out the Bee Gees. Bulked-up men were whistling the tune to Saturday Night Fever as they heaved and bench-pressed rusty iron. One of them glanced at my skinny legs and rumpled socks. "Be careful," he warned me. "At your age, this could stunt your growth...
...Awful" does not begin to describe it. He heaved the ball one-handed from his hip like an amateur shot-putter. It looked like the kind of shot an eight-year-old YMCA player tosses up because he is petrified of the five eight-year-olds on the other team, who are all waving their arms in his face...
...eating and living, not rapid, extreme weight loss.) With a structure and system behind her--psychologist Sagarin even offered to serve as a conduit between the family and Wayne's school--Bernadette became better able to help her son. Last summer Kevin Sibley, a mentor at a local YMCA, picked Wayne to join Sports Scholars, a physically demanding daily program for young boys. In a journal that Sibley required, Wayne drew an early picture of himself: sweaty, rotund, sad. At summer's end, a new doodle showed a beaming, muscular boy in a superhero's cape. By his November visit...